Dungeons and Dragons Onslaught Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Dungeons and Dragons Onslaught, a skirmish game published by Wizkids games. In Dungeons and Dragons Onslaught, players each field a team of fantasy heroes and attempt to complete the objectives of the scenario.

I started playing the Moldvay-era basic Dungeons and Dragons red and blue box and have played D&D off and on through the release of 5th edition as well as many of the gold box and other video games. My love of fantasy dungeon crawlers can be traced back to D&D. I’m also a fan of tactical skirmish games so I was pretty excited to get the opportunity to review D&D Onslaught.

D&D Onslaught seems to be Wizkids’ D&D-branded foray into tactical skirmish games like Kill Team, Warcry, and Heroscape. And much like OG Heroscape, Onslaught comes with pre-painted miniatures. So how does this two-player game measure up to other skirmish games?

After picking characters from each of the two included teams (there are expansions with more teams) and setting up their characters per the scenario instructions, one player will take the initiative card with a 1 on it and then deal the other five cards numbered 2 through 6 out with their opponent getting three of those cards. For skirmishes with more than three heroes, a second set of four cards (numbers 7 through 10) are shuffled and dealt out. Each player assigns an initiative order to each of their heroes. Enemy figures have an automatic value of X.5 (5.5, 3.5, etc.) which makes it very clear when they activate.

On each character’s turn, they can take a move action, a standard action, a bonus action, and all the free actions they can freely take for free. Standard actions can also be turned into move or bonus actions allowing for faster travel around the board and